The In-Between World of the Graphic Novelist

Gene Luen Yang’s “Boxers & Saints,” a box set of two parallel stories that delve into the lives of two Chinese youths on opposing sides of the Boxer Rebellion, was shortlisted for the National Book Award in the Young People’s Literature category. This is the second book by Yang to be nominated. “American Born Chinese,” which came out in 2006, was the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award. (Since then, only one other graphic novel has been nominated: “Stitches,” by David Small, in 2009.) The winners will be announced on November 20th. We recently spoke to Gene Yang about his work.

I think that, over all, we’re now seeing different ways of telling stories, of communicating. Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” was also nominated for a National Book Award, and you can make an argument that “Cabret” is like a cross between a traditional prose novel and a graphic novel. We’re seeing the merging together of texts and of visuals, and comics really sit right in the middle of that.

I minored in creative writing in college, and I’ve played with the idea of doing something more hybrid, but comics are my first love. I love the interplay between words and pictures. I love the fact that in comics, your pictures are acting like words, presenting themselves to be read. When I want to communicate something to my reader, I can think about whether a piece of information is better conveyed through the words or through the pictures. I really appreciate that flexibility. But the emotional reason is: I grew up reading comics, and I just have this deep attachment to the medium. I think a lot of the things in my life that I become most passionate about, and most excited about, are all from comics.

I also feel emotional attachment to the prose books I read. I really love all the things kids loved in the eighties. I loved Beverly Cleary, I loved Lloyd Alexander, and also a series nobody really remembers, about a kid named Alvin Fernald by a writer named Clifford Hicks, which was my absolute favorite prose series. But comics hold a special place in my heart. In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry. A complete work is not masterful unless both of those elements are masterful. So maybe there’s some sort of attachment there—the idea of words and pictures working together is part of my family history.

When I was growing up, the predominant genre in comics was superheroes, and superheroes are all about dual identities. It’s all about a character negotiating between two different worlds, a superhero world and a mundane world. And I think a lot of immigrants’ kids—not just Asian-Americans—can sympathize with that, even on an unconscious level. A lot of us grew up in two different worlds, two different cultures, two different names, two different aliases, and maybe that is part of the appeal, too.

I first became interested in the Boxer Rebellion in 2000, when Pope John Paul II canonized a group of saints in China. There are a hundred and twenty saints in China, eighty-seven of whom were ethnically Chinese. I grew up as a Chinese Catholic. My home church was incredibly excited about the Vatican’s announcement because this was the first time that this deeply Western Church had acknowledged the Chinese. When I looked into the lives of these newly canonized saints, I discovered that many of them had been martyred during the Boxer Rebellion, so that’s sort of what set me up. Soon, I also realized that the canonizations were somewhat controversial. The Chinese government issued a statement protesting them because, from their point of view, the Roman Catholic Church was honoring these traitors to Chinese culture. So the more I looked into this historical event, the more I felt like it really embodied a clash between identities, the clash between Eastern and Western ways of looking at things, that I’ve experienced throughout my life.

I got interested in the two sides of the Boxers: on one side was the European soldiers, the European missionaries, and the Chinese Christians, and then on the other side, it was the army of poor, starving teen-age boys who farmed the land of China, who believed that they could call the traditional Chinese gods down from the skies, and these gods would empower them with superpowers, with magical powers. On both sides, there’s this negotiation of identity. On the Boxers’ side, they had their farm-boy selves, and then they also had their alter egos where they believed they would embody these Chinese gods. It reminded me of Shazam, actually, and Captain Marvel.

And then on the Chinese Christian side, a lot of the early Chinese Christians were outsiders to mainstream Chinese culture. A lot of them were poor, indigent. Many were women, many were criminals, because if you were a convert, you were no longer subject to the Chinese criminal laws—you would be tried within the courts of the Church. So there were people who, for one reason or another, wanted to escape their surroundings and culture, and the way they did that was to negotiate this Western belief system with the culture that they were born into. And a lot of these early Chinese Christians—a lot of the Catholics, at least—had two different names. This was true of my community. A lot of older folks in my community, the one I grew up in, had two different names: a baptismal name that they would use in church, and a regular Chinese name that they would use outside of the church, same as the early Chinese Christians.

I also have two names. My given name is Gene Luen Yang—Gene is the closest English name, the closest American name, that my parents could find for my Chinese name, which is Jing. My baptismal name is Paul, after the apostle Paul, but for us who were born in America, even in church we used the American name that we used in school.

I think for all my comics, I just try to tell a story that is compelling enough to get the reader from beginning to end. I don’t know if I think that much about the age demographics while I’m doing it—the young-adult category was determined by my publisher. At the same time, I feel like my work really fits there: a lot of the themes that I like to deal with are very appropriate for young adults.

The announcement of the winner will be in late November. My wife and I are flying out to New York to be at the fancy dinner. I was actually a judge for the National Book Awards a few years ago; I got to see the inner workings. And they do not determine who the winner is until the lunch right before that dinner. They have all five judges in each category go out to lunch, and that’s when they figure it out. At this point, nobody would know—nobody does know.